THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2021 by Billie Jean King Enterprises, Inc.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: King, Billie Jean, author. | Howard, Johnette, author. | Vollers, Maryanne, author.
Title: All in : an autobiography / Billie Jean King ; with Johnette Howard and Maryanne Vollers.
Description: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2021. | Includes index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2020055683 (print) | LCCN 2020055684 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101947333 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781101947340 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524712082 (open market)
Subjects: LCSH: King, Billie Jean. | Tennis players—United States—Biography.
Classification: LCC GV994.K56 A3 2021 (print) | LCC GV994.K56 (ebook) | DDC 796.342092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020055683
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020055684
Ebook ISBN 9781101947340
Cover photograph by Kathy Willens / AP Images
Cover design by Chip Kidd
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Epilogue
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Appendix I
Appendix II
Appendix III
Photographic Credits
A Note About the Authors
To Ilana, my love, my partner,
to the moon and back
To my parents,
for their love, laughter, and the values that they instilled
in me that continue to shape my life every day
To my brother, R.J.,
whom I love, for a lifetime of support
and unconditionally loving me back
To everyone who continues to fight for
equity, inclusion, and freedom
Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.
—Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Preface
When I was a girl I’d sit in my elementary school classroom in Long Beach, California, staring at the big pull-down map of the world, and daydream about the places I’d go. England, Europe, Asia, South America, Africa! Even then, I felt that borders had no hold on me. They connected me. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have a restlessness, an ambition, and an urgency. As much as I loved my family and hometown, I always knew that my life would somehow take me beyond their embrace.
I was born in the wartime 1940s, reared in the buttoned-down 1950s, and came of age during the Cold War and rebellions of the 1960s. My father was a firefighter, and my mother was a homemaker who sometimes sold Tupperware and Avon products to help us get by. They were both determined to give my younger brother, Randy, and me a loving existence that was more stable than their broken families had been. But unrest was all around us. My early life played out against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the Cold War, assassinations, and antiwar protests of the 1960s; the LGBTQ+ rights movement would come later.
When I began playing youth tennis in the 1950s, college sports scholarships didn’t exist for girls. The only women’s pro sport was the Ladies Professional Golf Association, which was founded in 1950 by thirteen players but was still working to build purses and gain traction. The modern women’s sports movement as we know it essentially started the day nine of us players and a sharp businesswoman named Gladys Heldman, the publisher of World Tennis magazine, broke away in 1970 to create the first women’s pro tennis circuit, ignoring the sneers from a male-run tennis establishment that told us no one would pay to see us play, and then repeatedly threatened us with suspensions when it looked as if folks might.
I didn’t start out with grievances against the world, but the world certainly seemed to have grievances against girls and women like me: There was the principal who wouldn’t sign a permission slip to excuse me for a week-long tennis tournament until my mom went to the school office and said, “My daughter is a straight-A student. What could possibly be the problem?”; the elementary school teacher who sent a note to my parents explaining that she was marking me down a grade because “Billie Jean occasionally takes advantage of her superior ability” during recess playground games; the local tennis official at my first tennis tournament, Perry T. Jones, who turned heads by yanking me out of a group photograph when I was eleven years old because I was wearing white shorts, not a white skirt or white tennis dress.
Pursuing your goals as a girl or woman then often meant being pricked and dogged by slights like that. It made no sense to me. Why would anyone set arbitrary limits on another human being? Why were we being treated as “unreasonable” for asking reasonable questions? Why were we constantly told, Can’t do this. Don’t do that. Temper your ambition, lower your voice, stay in your place, act less competent than you are. Do as you’re told? Why weren’t a female’s striving and individual differences seen as life enriching, a source of pride, rather than a problem?
If I felt that way, I wondered how the people of color around me felt. When I was young I’d seen photos of how the Little Rock Nine students had to walk past an angry white mob to desegregate their Arkansas school in 1957, and how six-year-old Ruby Nell Bridges still had to be escorted daily by four federal marshals to attend classes at her previously all-white New Orleans school three years later. I knew the stories of how Althea Gibson and Jackie Robinson broke the color barriers in their respective sports, tennis and baseball.
The all-white country clubs that hosted tennis tournaments I began playing in were noticeably different from Long Beach’s Polytechnic High, the racially mixed school I attended. Poly was integrated in 1934, nine years before I was born. But my high school didn’t offer varsity sports for girls; free tennis instruction in the public parks was my only option.
As time passed, the incidents kept piling up. There was the sight of the top-ranked teenage boys getting free meals at the lunch counter at the Los Angeles Tennis Club
while my mother and I sat outside on benches behind the courts, eating the brown-bag lunches we brought. We weren’t comped, even though I was a top junior player, too. There was the future adviser who introduced himself to me after I won a match at age fifteen and said, “You’re going to be No. 1 someday, Billie Jean”—a thrilling first—only to have him tell me later, as casually as if he were appraising my backhand, “You’ll be good because you’re ugly.”
After I married Larry King and rose to No. 1 in the world, I still faced constant questions about whether playing tennis was “worth it,” and when I was going to retire and have children.
“Do you ask Rod Laver the same questions?” I’d respond, referring to one of the great male players of my era.
Even if you’re not a born activist, life can damn sure make you one.
The older I got, the more I aspired to. There wasn’t just unrest in the world around us. There was a storm gathering inside me.
* * *
—
To this day my 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” match against Bobby Riggs remains cast in the public imagination as the defining moment for me where everything coalesced and some fuse was lit. But in truth, that drive had been smoldering in me since I was a child. What the Riggs match and its fevered buildup proved was that millions of others felt locked in the same tug-of-war over gender roles and equal opportunities. I wanted to show that women deserve equality, and we can perform under pressure and entertain just as well as men. I think the outcome, and the discussions the match provoked, advanced our fight. A crowd of 30,472 , then a record for tennis, came to the Houston Astrodome for the match that September night. An estimated 90 million more watched the event worldwide on TV, a record for a sporting event.
Along the way, it has always amazed me when people saw me as a separatist. I’m an egalitarian, and I always have been. I’ve always pushed for everything to be equal, everyone pulling together, though I know how hard that is to achieve.
What’s become clear to me is that people and leaders of every generation have to argue and re-argue the details and meanings of eras for themselves. Coretta Scott King put it perfectly when she wrote, “Struggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is never really won. You earn it and win it in every generation.”
Today the work of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the NAACP is carried on by groups such as Black Lives Matter. The feminist arguments advanced by NOW helped inform the #MeToo movement and TIME’S UP. The 1969 Stonewall uprising led to ACT UP, which eventually led to LGBTQ+ rights and then marriage equality, gains that once seemed unfathomable. It wasn’t so long ago that women were fighting to get a few precious slots at medical schools and law schools. Now women run for president and sit on the Supreme Court and are celebrated with handles like “Notorious RBG.” (May she rest in power.)
Two of the unchanging, overarching lessons of my life are that people’s existence is rarely improved by sitting still in the face of injustice, and that the human spirit should never be underestimated. The human spirit can’t be caged.
What starts as a spark of ambition can not only lift you personally, it can change the world. The personal is political. A murmur rising from one soul can become a roar expressed by many. An act of defiance—insisting on basic human dignity, equal pay for equal work, a front seat on the bus—can ignite a movement that alters history. It may even sweep you into the company of presidents and queens, heroes and groundbreakers and contrarians who refuse to accept the status quo, especially when it renders them inferior or seems designed to erase them completely.
My life is proof of all that.
When I was outed as gay in 1981, corporate sponsors deserted me overnight. Today I laugh and think, “Wait—I get paid now to be a lesbian?”
But I’m getting ahead of myself…
Early on, what was most apparent to me was that the world I wanted didn’t exist yet. It would be up to my generation to create it. We were born on the cusp of the Baby Boom and walked a tightrope between shedding the old and shaping the new. For me, the timing turned out to be a profound blessing—and a burden that nearly broke me by age fifty, to a degree that few people know. Sometimes my biggest opponent was me.
Along the way, people often thought I was angry. They were wrong. More than anything, I was determined.
I won my share of fights.
But let me tell you how I truly became free.
Chapter 1
I can still remember exactly what it looked, felt, and sounded like on that September afternoon in 1954 when my life changed forever. The sky overhead was bright as a bluebird’s wing. The Southern California sun felt warm on my skin, and I could smell the spicy bark of the eucalyptus trees that surrounded the public tennis courts at Houghton Park in Long Beach. A handful of boys and girls were lining up for their drills as I arrived with my friend Susan Williams for my very first session with a coach named Clyde Walker. It wasn’t long before the thwock-thwock-thwock of the balls being struck on our court blended into the noise rising from the adjoining court, too.
Susan had introduced me to the sport a few weeks earlier by asking me a simple question as we sat in our fifth-grade classroom: “Do you want to play tennis?”
“What’s tennis?” I replied.
I listened intently as Susan explained that in tennis you could run, jump, and hit a ball—three things I loved about basketball and softball, two of the team sports I played. Susan invited me to play at the Virginia Country Club, to which her family belonged. I was predictably awful, but Susan thought it was funny when I blasted a ball over the fence and shouted, “Home run!”—a first, I’m guessing, at the venerable VCC.
On the way home my mind was racing. That night I asked my father, “Daddy, which sport would be best for a girl? You know, in the long term.”
My father put down his newspaper and thought for a while. “Well, there’s swimming, golf, and”—I waited for it—“tennis.”
Tennis! I had tried swimming, but I was the worst in my class at the YWCA. The great female star Babe Didrikson Zaharias played golf, but to me golf looked too slow. Tennis seemed just right. I liked the variety and mental challenge. I liked being able to hit the ball over and over. Tennis fascinated me from that first day I played with Susan, using a borrowed racket.
When I pestered my parents for my own racket, I wasn’t discouraged a bit when they reminded me that money was tight, and that I’d have to buy it myself. I did odd jobs for neighbors, who smiled and indulged me when I told them my goal. I weeded flower beds, swept sidewalks. My mom advanced me $2, and I rode my bike to a local pharmacy, where I bought candy and then resold it to the other kids at a small markup.
I put every nickel and dime I earned into a Mason jar above the kitchen sink. After a few months I couldn’t wait anymore and my parents took me to a sporting-goods shop. When my parents approached the salesman and said they’d like to see tennis rackets for their daughter, I mustered the courage to ask him what $8.29 could buy. He showed us a sweet little wood racket with a purple-and-white throat and a purple grip. I thought it was beautiful. I bought it and slept with it that night…and the next night…and many, many nights after that.
While I’ll remain forever grateful to Susan for introducing me to tennis, it was Clyde Walker whose free instruction made the sport come alive for me. Once Clyde showed us how to hit a proper groundstroke, I loved the pure feeling of the racket strings connecting cleanly with the ball, absorbing its energy and hurling it back. I couldn’t get enough of the thrill of making contact—how the transference of energy shoots through your fingers, your arm, your shoulder, and how your whole body is involved as you swing. I loved the drama of it all, too—chasing down each ball, the universe of possibilities that opened up as I drew my racket back, then that split-second pause where everything hangs in the balance as you’re preparing to hit a return. There was something swashbuckl
ing and instantly addictive about all of it. I loved the challenge and suspense of trying to hit a perfectly executed shot and the charge I got when the ball landed out of my opponent’s reach. Then I couldn’t wait to get the next ball and do it again.
By the end of that first afternoon with Clyde I knew I had discovered my sport. It was as if a window into my future had been flung open. I was only ten, but in the breathy way that ten-year-olds think, I was already certain it was my destiny, and I just had to tell somebody.
“Mom! Mom! I found out what I’m going to do with my life!” I said when she arrived to pick me up in our green DeSoto. “I want to be the No. 1 tennis player in the world!”
She smiled. This was not unlike the time a few years earlier when I stood in the kitchen as we were drying the dishes and told her, “Mom, I’m going to do something great with my life—I just know it! You watch.”
This time—as then—my mother looked at me and said the absolutely best, most revolutionary thing she could have said to a girl like me in 1954: “Okay, dear.”
* * *
—
I was grateful that my parents resisted setting limits on me, which is different from saying that my upbringing was always progressive. My mom and dad were strict and conservative in many ways, but they also told my brother and me we could be anything we wanted to be. When Randy, who is five years younger than me, announced at the dinner table one night that he also intended to be a pro athlete—a Major League Baseball player—both my parents covered their faces with their hands, then peered out through their fingers with a look that said, Not you, too? Mom was already driving me to tennis matches all over Long Beach and beyond. My dad later said we wore out three cars between Randy and me.
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